Since Mitt Romney announced his tax plan, the media have
demanded that he provide more detail.In
particular, they want to know exactly which deductions he wants to eliminate
while cutting the rates.That’s a
perfectly reasonable question, but why is only Romney expected to provide specifics,
while President Obama continues to speak in puffy generalities?

Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, famously said that
Congress needed to pass Obamacare in order to find
out what was in it.Even if the
legislators had given themselves time to read the bill, they’d have found that many
of its provisions were not explicitly stated, but were left to the discretion
of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Although
Obama had pledged that all legislation would be made available to the public
online five days before it became law, he signed the 2,409-page Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act two days after it passed the Senate, its contents
remaining largely a mystery to those who had voted on it, let alone their
constituents.

Nowhere did that law require employers to provide coverage
for contraceptives and abortifacients, but it did
empower Sebelius to impose this requirement
unilaterally.Her decree was later
amended to exempt Catholic churches, but not other Catholic institutions like
hospitals and charity organizations.The
controversy that arose from this has been thoroughly reported, but there have
been no demands for Obama to spell out what other parts of his plan he sneaked
through the legislative process through subterfuge.

The president’s stimulus package – also deemed too important
to read before passing – was supposed to have created 2.5 million “shovel-ready
jobs.”More than two years later, he
joked that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”Do you suppose if he’d been forced to explain
his plan in greater detail, we might have discovered flaws like that before blowing
$825 billion to find out?

Obama now accuses Romney of secretly planning to raise taxes
on middle-income earners, based on a discredited static economic analysis which
assumes that tax rate cuts need to be “paid for” by raising taxes on somebody
else.Romney says his plans do not
include any tax hikes on anybody, and there is no substantive reason to doubt
him.Obama, on the other hand, has
repeatedly pledged never to raise taxes on individuals earning less than
$200,000 a year, and he insists that he has kept that promise.Well, unless you’re a smoker, that is, or
unless you go to tanning salons.

Also,
you can no longer buy over-the-counter medicine with funds from your pre-tax
Health Savings Account, and the penalty for early withdrawals from your HSA
will soon be doubled.Starting next
year, the amount you’re allowed to deposit into your Flexible Spending Account
will be capped at 2,500 per year, so that if your medical spending exceeds that
amount, it will expose more of your income to taxation.

The Medical Itemized Deduction Hurdle has also been raised
from 7.5 to 10 percent, meaning that you must pay at least 10 percent of your
adjusted gross income for health care in order to take a deduction for it on
your income tax.Those whose health care
spending ranges between 7.5 and 10 percent of their income will no longer be
able to claim the deduction.

In addition, Obama wants to allow the Bush tax cuts to
expire, which will raise income tax rates, cut the child tax credit in half,
and reinstitute the marriage penalty.It
may also expose more than 25 million middle-income earners to the Alternative
Minimum Tax.Still, you’d be
hard-pressed to find media criticism of him for having broken his word.When fact-checking a Democrat president, a
mere ten examples disproving his claim are hardly worth mentioning.

President Obama has never been one to let the himself be
bothered by the details.When David
Letterman asked him how high the national debt was, he said he didn’t know, and
made it clear that he didn’t care, either.Letterman’s guess of $10 trillion was actually close to what it was when
Obama took office.It’s not surprising
that the president didn’t point out that he’d added about $6 trillion since
then.Besides, he explained, “We don’t
have to worry about it short-term.”

By “we,” he must be referring to himself and his friends in
the media.The only thing they have to
worry about in the short term is Mitt Romney.So don’t hassle them over a trifling detail like six trillion dollars in
debt.